Self Portrait Series

My long term resolution for the New Year has been to 

confront my tendency toward harsh self criticism and to try 

to be more accepting of who I am and the skin I am in.

So far, I've done a series of photographic selfies, but my 

friend Shiloh, who always was and still is, smarter and more 

insightful than I am, suggested that maybe I should be 

looking at this as an art project, a la Frida Kahlo.

I contemplated that idea. It makes more sense than merely 

staring at mirror images of myself on a computer screen. I 

don't know that I will ever love photographs of myself. I 

don't know if I will ever be able to view myself without 

focusing on my flaws, but I can certainly confront and fight 

against that tendency in myself.

I picked out my first selfie of 2016 and tried to alter myself 

into art. If the standard of success is to obliterate most of 

myself from the piece, then I think I succeeded.

Still, it's a new slant on an only slightly older project. I am a 

work in progress. Long live vanity!

Heartless

Your heart trembled in my hands;
my eyes, blind.
The men were my mirror.
My self work so much
spilled semen on satin sheets.

You left your door open.  
I chose the window.
I thought he was my vision quest,
my knight in the sweat lodge.

He clanked in,
full of answers
to the wrong questions.

I left you; lost you;
your heart so much shrapnel 
beneath my hooves,
charging the wrong way.

Fish Hunt

My original exposure to Frida Kahlo was several of her self portraits.  While I admired her skill in capturing her own likeness, I wasn't blown away.  I had heard her described as a feminist icon, but, based on the self portraits, I wasn't getting it.

Later, I did a little more research and came across more of her work.  

Finally, I understood.  

I think artists reflect their struggles in their work.  We use our art as a way of working through a lot of our emotional turmoil, of trying to make sense of our own pain and the madness of the world.

The more I learned about Frida Kahlo, the more I understood.

She suffered through polio as a child.  This led her to dream of  a life in medicine. Helping to fight childhood illness would help her make sense of what she suffered.

Unfortunately, in her late teens, she was involved in a truly horrific bus accident. Her life and her body were hopelessly shattered.

How to frame that so that it makes any kind of sense?

The crooked lines of God?

So that she could help lead the world to a Marxist paradise?

So that she could inspire generations of female artists?

She endured dozens of surgeries.  She had her heart broken by both Diego Rivera, her husband, and by Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the October Revolution.

She couldn't bear the children she longed for.  She couldn't go a day without physical agony.

What was it all for?

I look at the pain in my own life and it is nothing compared to what Frida Kahlo suffered.

I hope there was a purpose to it and that she made peace with it all before the end. 

There are three specific pieces of hers that I completely love.

Previously, I completed an homage to "The Two Fridas", one of my favorites.

With "The Fish Hunt", I was drawing on the brutal, twisted life of Albert Fish and couldn't help including a little homage to Frida Kahlo's "The Wounded Deer".

Of course, I think my favorite piece is "The Broken Column".

Her struggle was a difficult one.  I cannot even begin to imagine the daily pain that she suffered.  I admire her idealism in believing in Marxism as the great hope of a great future for the world.

Her life was an unending heartbreak that was reflected in her work.

When you're shattered into so many pieces, is it even possible to achieve a sense of wholeness?  For everything to ever truly come together?  

That struggle is why she became an artist.

Pain leads us to a creative place and we try to filter it, via our art, into some semblance of meaning.